With graphic t-shirts flooding the floors of every fast fashion store, we often come to find that when there is writing on a shirt, It is in a different language, and for whatever reason, it is usually French.
As Americans, what is our whole obsession with French words? Is it that we think if we throw a few improperly used fancy words on a t-shirt that it makes it 10x's more chic? Or is it that we all are just hopeless dreamers who fawn over the romanticized idea of France?
Regardless, we fall for it every time. I came home with this “Parlez vous brunçh?” shirt one day, and my sister, who speaks a little bit of French, looked at it, and said "Do you speak brunch? That doesn't even make sense." So I investigated further...
I found an article from BuzzFeed entitled, "French Speakers Hilariously Discuss What French T-Shirts Actually Say" And my shirt was one of the ones they discussed. Here is what they said about it:
Marie: Why the ç?
Amaury: [That would make "brunch" sound like] brunsss.
Marie: It makes no sense. They were probably disappointed the rest of the sentence didn't have weird accents, so they slipped one in there.
Amaury: "Jess, add a thingy under the c. They'll love it. So French."
Clearly, I found this article pretty laughable. There were other shirts that had wording like, "Le Arte" to which their response was, "This is not even French. Putting "le" in front of a random foreign-sounding word doesn't make it French."
After reading all of this, it made me wonder what French people think of us when they see us flaunting poorly written phrases on shirts, and it has also made me concerned as to what Japanese print shirts might actually say, if they say anything at all. OR... Do other countries have shirts with random English words written on them? Needless to say, I am a bit more conscious now with what my shirts say! But hey, I still love fun quirky shirts like this; I guess I am just one of those hopeless dreamers waiting for the day to actually get to travel to France. Don't worry though... I will not bring this shirt with for fear of being laughed at.
You can find the rest of the BuzzFeed article here...